


Object Lessons: Season 1

by Polly_Lynn



Series: Object Lessons [1]
Category: Castle (TV 2009)
Genre: Angst, Awkward Crush, Awkward Flirting, Crushes, Estrangement, F/M, Friends to Lovers, Friendship, Humor, Loss, Loss of Parent(s), Male-Female Friendship, Partners to Lovers, Romance, Team as Family
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-12
Updated: 2019-11-12
Packaged: 2021-01-29 07:17:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 10,048
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21406324
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Polly_Lynn/pseuds/Polly_Lynn
Summary: I recently started rewatching Castle from the beginning, after taking time off after Dialogic. With Dialogic, I chose a line of dialogue from each episode to prompt the story. For these ten stories, I chose an object from the episode.Although I suppose in my mind these are "in continuity" with one another, one can certainly read them independent of one another.
Relationships: Kate Beckett & Richard Castle, Kate Beckett/Richard Castle, Kate Beckett/Will Sorenson
Series: Object Lessons [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1622947
Comments: 30
Kudos: 23





	1. Catalyst—Flowers for Your Grave (1 x 01)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He stares down, disbelieving, at the ruined title page. The handwriting is undeniably his, what he can still see of it, anyway—jagged, irregular bits that peek out from beneath frustrated slashes of ink that run through what used to be words. The pen that etched those slashes deep into the paper is undeniably clenched between his fingers, and still he stares down in disbelief.

He stares down, disbelieving, at the ruined title page. The handwriting is undeniably his, what he can still see of it, anyway—jagged, irregular bits that peek out from beneath frustrated slashes of ink that run through what used to be words. The pen that etched those slashes deep into the paper is undeniably clenched between his fingers, and still he stares down in disbelief.

It was fine. The two generic lines he’d sandwiched in between her name and his own—in thirty-point font underscored by the bold slash of his signature—were absolutely fine. They’d been better than fine thousands of times before he’d set them beneath the imperious letters of her name, her title. And any way, the stupid book is a ruse. It’s an In Case of Emergency move that he probably won’t even need. He’ll probably be well clear of the precinct, booty in tow, before she’s even in for the day.

It’s a ruse—a precaution—but he slams the ruined book shut. He reaches for another in the stack behind him. He flips to a fresh title page and freezes, pen poised. He grits his teeth and forces his hand to move, but all he can seem to get down is his signature, more cramped and hurried than it should be. It’s terrible. He slams the second book shut and shoves it aside.

He reaches for scratch paper. It’s ridiculous, but he reaches for a cube cut to look like a three-dimensional skull and tugs a few sheets free of the glue strip at the top. He drafts long lines and short ones. He pencils in his name in thirty-point all caps and scrawls hers above it. He goes for breezy and careless. He experiments with calligraphy. He crumples and shreds and folds sheet after sheet until his three-dimensional skull is down to pretty much teeth and jaws, and he still has nothing.

He grows desperate enough to reach for a third book. He stares at the fresh title page, hoping it will shock something out of him at last. It does. It works, though his heart is pounding and his knuckles are white as the pen moves across the terrifying expanse of white. _Kate,_ he writes, breathing a sigh of relief as everything else falls away—her title, her last name, every other stupid, snarky, cutesy thing he’d considered.

_Kate.  
_

  
He sits up straight to get a better look at it. He shifts the book on the blotter and enjoys the play of light and shadow. He likes the look of it—her name, then his, and his again. His hand moves lightning fast now to set down his signature with more flourish than he usually allows himself when he’s signing.

The lines come easily then. They’re simple and honest and a little obnoxious and he thinks she’ll like them. He thinks that’ll annoy her, and it all sounds about right. He dots the end of them with an emphatic period. He gathers up the evidence of his struggles. There’s enough that it looks like highly localized indoor snowfall.

He ends up pulling the hem of his t-shirt taut and sweeping the whole lot into the makeshift basket of it. He creeps into the living room on soft feet and heads for the door. He’ll feel better with all of it fluttering its way down the trash chute.

“Dad?”

He yelps at the sound of his daughter’s sleep-heavy voice. He yips, actually, in a previously unknown part of his vocal register. He jumps a good foot into the air, and paper goes flying everywhere.

“Alexis. What are you doing up?” He turns, disoriented, and tries to find a window. Maybe she should be up. Maybe it’s morning and he’s already late.

“I heard you,” she says. She’s already on her knees, attending to the mess he’s made. “You were slamming things, and then it was quiet.” She looks up at him. “I thought you’d finally gone to bed.”

“I am.” He goes to his knees, too. He works quickly, gathering everything he can reach. “I’m just about to, but I need to—I’m getting rid of these.” He holds up a sheepish handful. “That’s all, and then bed. Promise.”

“But what are they?” She frowns down at a scrap on her palm, then her gaze snaps up to lock with his. “Are you … writing?”

She asks in a voice so small that it breaks his heart. He holds out his hands to take her share of the load.

“I am,” he says quietly, and a profound shock runs through him. It’s true. It’s a handful of simple, honest, obnoxious words that’ll annoy her a little, but counts. For the first time in months, it counts. “I’m writing.”


	2. Talisman—Nanny McDead (1 x 02)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The elevator is on its way down before she remembers. Before she realizes, really. She’s too tired for remembering, but that’s kind of the point. She’s leaning too comfortably against the back wall of the car as it makes its herky-jerky way down, and that shouldn’t be possible. There should be an oversized bag in the way, hanging off one protesting shoulder.

The elevator is on its way down before she remembers. Before she realizes, really. She’s too tired for remembering, but that’s kind of the point. She’s leaning too comfortably against the back wall of the car as it makes its herky-jerky way down, and that shouldn’t be possible. There should be an oversized bag in the way, hanging off one protesting shoulder. 

The elevator hits the first floor with its usual, graceless thump. The doors squeal open and a crowd of cops, both uniformed and not, give their handcuffed company for the evening a shove forward, then a tug back when they spy her in the corner. 

She can’t do it, she decides as she levers herself upright. She just can’t bear to ride all the way back up for the bag that lies forgotten in the big bottom drawer of her desk. She can’t when she knows it’ll mean getting button-holed by someone or other for one last question. It’ll mean giving in to one last glance at the inbox, the file, her messages. She makes her way through the doors instead, nodding right and left on the off-chance that she actually knows any of the faces she’s too bleary-eyed to focus on right now. 

She pats her coat pockets to confirm she’s got her badge, keys, and phone on her. She flips the skirts back t and feels for the little bit of cash she makes a habit of shoving in her pants pockets for occasions such as this. Her fingers find the edges of a few bills and a heavy collection of change that plucks at her attention. Why the hell is she hauling change around? 

She pushes the question aside and pulls her coat closed. She’s got enough for a cab, and as the cold hits her, she’s tempted—sorely tempted—to flag one down, but the thought of rolling the dice and getting stuck with a talkative driver is less appealing than the more or less guaranteed elbow-to-elbow anonymity of the subway. She turns right with a sigh, buttoning up and tucking her scarf into the neck of her coat as she goes. 

She hardly remembers the ride. It should alarm her. It does alarm her somewhere in the back of her exhausted mind as she pushes through the door of her apartment, but the relief she feels at being home at last tamps it right down. 

She goes through the ritual of hanging up her coat and scarf, of slipping her weapon out of its holster and into the box atop her dresser along with her mom’s ring, her dad’s watch. She drags her sweater over her head in almost the same motion as she pulls on a shapeless, oversized t-shirt. 

She’s tired enough that she needs a second to lean against the dresser before she can face the idea of shedding the pants she’ll have to hang up if she doesn’t want to face the horror of having to iron. She buys herself another few as she goes through the motions of emptying her pockets. She tucks the bills under the corner of the heavy wooden box and scoops the mystery coins into her palm. 

Her stomach growls loudly, and she thinks that’s it—the answer to why the unfamiliar weight has been prodding at the edges of her attention. She remembers shaking Esposito down for change for a couple dollars. She remembers that she’d meant to grab something from the vending machine in lieu of actual dinner. 

“Apparently that didn’t happen,” she mutters aloud as nickels and dimes rain down on the dresser top. 

Her hand closes before the last coin falls. It closes tight, and her heart is suddenly pounding. She’s suddenly wide awake and present. Her fist opens, one finger at a time, revealing a tarnished quarter in the center of her palm. A shiver chases from the crown of her head down her spine and all the way out to the very tips of her fingers. Her breath catches and she feels her whole body in the grip of his storytelling all over again. 

_He almost smiled at his good fortune when he found a quarter in his pocket …   
_

She keeps an awkward hold on the coin as she shucks her pants and, yes, hangs them up. 

“Stupid,” she tells it, scowling down as it glints in the light of her bedside lamp. “Stupid.” 

But she sets it on the nightstand, right at the corner. She snaps off the light and peeks at it through one eye cracked open. It catches the streetlight that bleeds through the slats of the shutters. It pulses, blue and eerie and just within reach. It holds the magic of it—the moment, his voice, the story. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: This was almost about The Scarf. But then it wasn’t. Also. Hmmm.


	3. Interior—Hedgefund Homeboys (1 x 03)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He is working on his villain. He means to be working on his villain, but the man keeps stubbornly getting himself killed. He’s a philandering mediocrity and the world has let him fail up and up and up, but no more. Someone keeps stabbing him in some massive expanse of commercial real estate or poisoning his private bottle at the club or throwing him out the window. That one’s kind of fun, at least. 

He is working on his villain. He means to be working on his villain, but the man keeps stubbornly getting himself killed. He’s a philandering mediocrity and the world has let him fail up and up and up, but no more. Someone keeps stabbing him in some massive expanse of commercial real estate or poisoning his private bottle at the club or throwing him out the window. That one’s kind of fun, at least. 

He makes a note to ask Alexis if he’s ever thrown anyone out a window before and sets his villain aside. It’s pretty clear the jackass is the victim, too, which is kind of a pain in the ass. It means he needs a killer and at least one secondary victim—the one whose death will land the emotional punch he’ll need, because apparently his stupid villain is his stupid victim and it’s going to be hard for anyone to care when he buys it. It all sounds like the kind of work he doesn’t want to do, so he closes the book on it, metaphorically. 

He clicks the_ x_ in the upper left-hand corner with extreme prejudice and starts fresh with another document. _She_ spills across the page. It’s literal at first, a tidy, left-justified list of truths about his heroine—things she does, things she says, things she is. It feels like cheating. It_ is_ cheating. He already knows so much about her, so he closes that, too. He double-checks that he’s saved it—he triple checks—then closes it with a sigh. 

He drags his fingers in circles over the trackpad, willing something useful to come to him. Inspiration strikes, for once. He pops open another fresh document and casts his mind back to the Kendalls’ apartment. He sketches out the boundaries of the space in a few rough-edged sentences. He shades in the mismatched dining room chairs, and the weird, tubular light fixture hanging far too low over the massive table. He chuckles to himself as he tries to find words for the twisting, hammered-silver sculpture that don’t involve comparisons to a bottle opener. 

He’s wound his way back to his villain, his victim, his pain in the ass. However big the Kendalls’ pre–Lehman place might have been, it can’t have been big enough for that vulgar mishmash—an East African bust of carved ebony against the backdrop of that oversized Japanese screen, and facing both, fetish dolls from nowhere in particular. He spreads these out on the page. He tucks in more, larger, bolder, emphatic things, and he drops a different set of walls around it all. 

He sits back in the desk chair, satisfied that he knows exactly the window this jackass will go sailing out of. He knows the echo of his detective’s heels on the hardwood floors of his opulent, utterly tasteless home. He lets his fingers drag slowly down the trackpad, stopping every once in a while to snip out something that’s too obviously intrusive commentary drawn from life or add in something the snow plow of his mind has gathered up, now that he’s thinking about people with more money than taste. 

He’s satisfied, then abruptly not satisfied. He opens his latest She document again and scans down the page. It reads like blank verse, just like almost all the others. A few have fragments of dialogue—her end of it, and some sprinkling of ripostes from him, the _He_ that he’s hardly begun to imagine. A few have set pieces of her rolling up in an unmarked, striding into the crime scene, turning up the collar of her coat as she heads home. 

None—not one—tells him anything about where she lives. He can’t imagine the weight of the door under her shoulder and he doesn’t know what she sees in that first moment when her back meets whatever it’s made of and she lets out a sigh that carries with it all the discontents and struggles of the day. He doesn’t know if the place is clean lines and smooth surfaces, or if it’s filled with pleasantly mismatched things that mean something—things she’s bought in the far corners of the city and things she’s come into along the way. 

He doesn’t know if she throws open curtains or shutters each morning, and he can’t envision the walls at all. Are they industrial brick or heavy plaster? Are they painted or papered or bare beneath the things she’s hung with care from a picture rail or stuck up on a whim with Blu Tack? He doesn’t know at all what she surrounds herself with and it’s … vexing. 

His fingers twitch toward his phone, then stop. It’s the middle of the night. He can’t just call her and ask about her taste in art. He can’t just call and ask if she has a ceiling rack of copper-bottomed pots she doesn’t get to use as much as she’d like, or if she favors oils or watercolor or textured modern stuff. He can’t just call her. 

It’s … vexing. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Hmmm. Objects were more elusive in this episode.


	4. Overture—Hell Hath No Fury (1 x 04)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He brings out the petty in her. She’s not proud of that.

He brings out the petty in her. She’s not proud of that.

“Come _on,”_ he whines. “Haven’t I earned it?”

It’s a standoff in the break room, and she might be petty, but he’s pushy.

“NYPD-issued mugs.” She leans back against the counter, her body between him and his current heart’s desire. “For NYPD personnel.”

“You just like watching me burn my hands on those stupid paper things.” He bobs from side, his eyes on the row of mugs drying on the drainboard behind her. “Those useless little … wings or whatever they are. They’re a hazard, do you know that? They’re an actual _hazard.” _

“Gee, Castle.” She folds her arms across her chest. It’s a blatant invitation to try—just try—to make the break around her body that she knows he’s considering. “It’s too bad you’re not rich or something. Then you might be able to get your coffee—in a proper cup, even—literally anywhere else.”

He has a retort spooled up. It’s something bratty and pushy and infuriating. She can practically taste it. Every_ bit_ of petty in her stands ready to hit back, twice as hard, but he pulls up short at the last second. He drops into another gear entirely.

“Anywhere else might have real cups, Detective.” He goes meekly to the stack of cheap paper things they trot out for their least favorite visitors and makes a production out of unfolding the flimsy double handles and working his finger through the holes that are too small by a lot. “But they wouldn’t have such charming company.”

The scalding coffee hits the cup and burns right through to the thin skin of his knuckle where it’s wedged up against the paper. He hisses between his teeth and turns it into a smile.

_Good,_ she thinks as she storms past him and back in the direction of her desk. _Good._

He_ really_ brings out the petty in her.

It’s the only explanation for what she does later. What she does when Esposito and Ryan defect to Team Flavor Country. What she does when there is absolutely no reason to do it.

_Petty, _she thinks as she brushes her hair out with almost violent motions and sprays it within an inch of its life. _Petty._ It’s her eye-makeup, zipper dance, peep-toe or ankle-strap, statement jewelry mantra as she stomps out the door and makes her dramatic entrance, peeling the_ A-_line coat from her shoulders and draping it carelessly over one arm as she golf claps with the best of them. 

His reaction is exactly what she expects, and then it isn’t at all. She has him rising to the bait with her melodramatic imitation, and then his mother is there. His_ kid_ is there and she wants to scrub off the stupid, shimmery eye makeup and pocket the chandelier earrings. She looks down at her peep-toe pumps and wants to die on the spot, because what is she_doing? _What does he have her_ doing?_

That all gets lost in the wash of rage when the name _Nikki Heat_ makes its way into her world and no foam-core cutout of his smug, smiling self can save him. A blast radius opens up around them as they trade furious whispers. She’s vaguely aware of the ring of onlookers—his adoring fans from eighteen to eighty who all want a piece of him. She thinks about tearing the head off the stupid cutout and tossing it to the masses, because see above, re: petty and him.

She thinks about going.

She_ is_ going when he does it to her again. He switches off whatever it is she brings out in him. He ditches the furious whisper and sets the cutout on its feet, well away from them.

“We don’t have to do this here,” he says abruptly in a tone that would be normal if it weren’t so …blurty. “We could go for coffee. You could tell me to change the name, and I could tell you I won’t. Over coffee.”

“It’s too late for coffee,” she snaps.

It’s stupid. It’s ambiguous—after hours, or at the end of the world. It might mean either. It’s stupid, and it makes him smile. It makes her blush.

“Hot chocolate, then.” He shoves his hands in his pockets. He tries to strike a pose, but there’s something goofy about it. It’s fidgety. He’s fidgeting. “Herbal tea. Whatever.”

“You’re not seriously asking me for coffee.” She waves a hand and hates the plastic jangle of her over-the-top bracelets.

“Why wouldn’t I be seriously asking you for coffee?” He cocks his head.

It’s a question. It’s an honest question even though there’s a ring of onlookers. There’s his mother and his kid and a stupid foam core cutout of him, and still it’s a question.

“I don’t know,” she says, and it’s honest at first. It’s an answer, but then she panics. The petty rises up. “Figured you might have another date with a prostitute, Castle.”

“On a school night?”

He laughs as he says it. She laughs, too, but the moment is broken.

The world around them swings back into motion. Fans edge closer to him. Alexis says something firm to Martha and the two of them make a beeline for the furious knot of activity that springs up around him. 

  
She’s edged out the side, dancing almost with the stupid cutout. He lifts his head to find her over the crowd pressing in around him. He gives her a wistful nod even as he dips his head and murmurs something along the lines of _Sorry, I didn’t catch that_ to whoever it is that’s closet, loudest, most determined.

She nods back. She slips her arms into the A-line coat and makes her way out of the crowd.

He brings out the petty in her. She brings out something just like it in him. But he was seriously asking her for coffee.   
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Hmmm. Coffee cups …


	5. Laceration—A Chill Goes Through Her Veins (1 x 05)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He has a paper cut.

He has a paper cut.

It’s enormous. It slashes right up the side of his index finger, across the first joint, and cuts a hard right directly into the nail bed. It hurts when he bends it. It hurts when he straightens it. It hurts when he types or holds a pen or a toothbrush or anything else he’d rather not drop. It hurts when he washes his hands, and if he doesn’t wash them well enough and, God forbid, something gets in it. It throbs and stings and catches on absolutely everything—the inside of his jeans pocket when he reaches for his wallet, of his jacket when he reaches for his phone or his notebook.

And it _bleeds._

He’s a writer. He’s not exactly a stranger to the injury. He’s got drawers and cubbies and hidey holes in and around his desk are filled with band-aids that won’t flex the right way, and band-aids that flex so much they fall right off. He’s got medical tape, and paint-on liquid bandages, and he’s rolling in topical anesthetic, both with and without triple antibiotic cream. He’s resorted to crazy glue and clear nail polish and clear nail polish over crazy glue and vice versa.

Nothing helps, though. It hurts and it bleeds and it calls attention to itself.

Ultimately, it gets him in trouble.

“Castle!”

She snaps his name out sharply enough that he drops the cup and saucer the last half inch on to her desk. There’s an almost audible _poof!_ as the intricate layer of foam he’d just spent the last five minutes constructing collapses in on itself. The espresso beneath slops over the delicate rim, making a general mess of things. 

“What?” he snaps back. The crook of his finger around the cup handle has managed to set the paper cut off all over again, and the pain makes him stupid. 

“What?” She gives him a look she probably wouldn’t inflict on a true idiot and swivels the cup on its base with a dramatic gesture. “That!” She points accusingly to lurid smear of red slashing across the polished ceramic. “What is _that?” _

“That’s …” He winces, partly because it’s gross, partly because he’s in pain, and mostly because he is abruptly terrified. “It’s just—well, ew, obviously. Sorry. I’ll just make—“

“What happened?” She grabs for his hand. She’s fast and she’s strong and the move tumbles him into the chair beside her desk. It knocks his knees hard against the steel case. “Jeez, Castle, what’d you do?”

She has his palm turned upward under the light of her goose-necked desk lamp. She hunches her shoulders and peers intently at the irritated skin with its dotted line of still-beading blood.

“Nothing,” he croaks. His mouth is dry and his heart is racing. He can literally see the skipping blue pulse in his wrist. A panicked giggle races up his throat as he realizes he wouldn’t last five seconds in one of her interrogations. “Paper cut.” 

It’s a perfectly reasonable thing to say. It’s not merely plausible, it happens to be the truth, but he’s screwing it up. Her eyes narrow.

_“That’s_ a paper cut?” She side nods to it, not bothering to look. “You got some kind of millionaire super-thick paper? Or …” 

Something dawns on her. Something he was hoping against hope would not dawn on her. 

“A file folder!” She lets out a triumphant little laugh. He feels his cheeks go damp and clammy as the blood drains from them. She drops his hand and leans back in her chair. “You were rifling through Melanie Cavanaugh’s file, and you sliced the hell out of your finger.” She slaps the desk hard, making the cup jump in its saucer, making the pool of cooling coffee dance. “Justice is_ served!”_

“Justice is served,” he says with a smile that can’t possible look right. He seizes on the cup—the ruined coffee he’d made for her—as an excuse. “Or it will be when I make you a latte that’s a little less crime scene-y.”

He makes a move for the saucer, but the cut, chooses that moment to let loose with an obscene drop of blood. It hits the rim and follows a meandering path to mix with the coffee. He feels light headed as images of her mother’s crime scene flash through his mind.

“You should really take care of that.”

She reaches for his sleeve again. He jerks back suddenly enough—violently enough—that the move tugs her forward. She looks like her mother in the light of the goose-necked desk lamp. She has her build and her cheekbones and her tragically beautiful hands. She has the same heart-stopping light-and-dark eyes and it’s so much. The burden of that resemblance is _so much_ that he almost blurts out the truth. 

He almost tells her there’s a smear of blood on the lower right-hand corner of a file in a box on a shelf under a lousy string of bare bulbs. He almost confesses everything, but he’s startled her. Her guard is up again, and her light-and-dark eyes are hooded.

“It’s fine,” he says in a voice that’s tight and strange. He curves his palm around the cup, saucer, and all, as though he’s sparing her the gruesome sight. “Just a paper cut.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: This is 100% the episode when he decides he’s going to marry her. Also Hmmm. And file folders.


	6. Centerfold—Always Buy Retain (1 x 06)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Being a woman in her line of work, she’d always thought the problem would be breaking into the Old Boys’ Club. It certainly has been, along the way. At the academy, in the early days on patrol, she’d had to weather her share of posturing, pissing matches, and No Girls Allowed exclusions.

Being a woman in her line of work, she’d always thought the problem would be breaking into the Old Boys’ Club. It certainly has been, along the way. At the academy, in the early days on patrol, she’d had to weather her share of posturing, pissing matches, and No Girls Allowed exclusions.

Nowadays, though, half the time she has trouble feeling like one of the girls. It’s not that she resents how tight Ryan and Esposito are with one another—it makes them great partners and a valuable pair on the team. It’s not even that she finds herself rolling her eyes a hundred times a day at the way they get wrapped up in the kind of gossip, intrigue, and absolutely inane discussions she’d hoped she’d left behind in junior high.

She’s their boss, though, and sometimes, that means she has to be the one to call lights out or shut down some of their more ridiculous conversations. Sometimes it means confiscating contraband or having to say in her outside-her-head voice that no, Esposito cannot keep a topless hula dancer on his desk, no not even if it has been in his family for generations. And sometimes it means creeping right up on the two of them when they’re huddled around Ryan’s monitor to disrupt whatever it is they shouldn’t be doing in the workplace first thing in the morning.

“Do you know how tired I am of writing the two of you up for porn?”

She times the low growl in Esposito’s ear to coincide exactly with the slap of her palm down on the desk within a millimeter of Ryan’s hand on the mouse. Neither one of them does her the courtesy of even looking guilty, let alone jumping a foot in the air, as is right and proper.

“Beckett!” Ryan beams at her. “You’re here!”

“You gotta see this.” Esposito scuffs his feet, rolling his chair backward to make room for her. “Check out your boy!”

“My … boy?” Her heart sinks. She closes her eyes, but it’s too late. The image of him in that vest—that _idiotic_ vest—is already seared into her retinas. “Who even took that?”

She gives in. She opens her eyes and leans close to the monitor to take in the grainy-but-not-grainy-enough photo. He has his stupid, fancy cell phone clutched to his ear, of course, and he looks like he’s about to launch into a run.

“Who cares?” Ryan clicks the popped-out image to reveal it in context. He sits back and indicates the browser window with a grand gesture. “We made _Fashion Scoop Daily._”

“Wh—What? _Why?”_ She looks to Esposito for some glimmer of sanity, but his grin matches the wattage of Ryan’s exactly. “That is _not_ fashion!”

“What’s not fashion?” He appears—he fucking _materializes_—absolutely without warning. She jumps a foot in the air, because that’s the kind of morning it is. “Is that porn, boys? Because there is a lot of fashion in porn. It just falls by the wayside pretty quick.”

“That’s no one’s porn.” She straightens up and brushes by him as she detaches herself from their little hen party. “Except maybe your ego’s.”

“My ego’s?” He shoots her a confused look, then shoves his way in for a closer look at the screen. “That’s … where’s that? When did that go up?” 

Something in his voice stops her halfway to her desk. It’s not the insufferable smugness she was expecting. It’s not that at all. She turns. Ryan and Esposito are still chattering back and forth. They’re talking at him, not to him, and then suddenly they’re talking to his retreating back. He’s making his way out of the bullpen with his phone pressed to his ear.

She doesn’t follow. Of course she doesn’t. She finishes the trek to her desk. She sits and pushes aside the fact that she almost followed—that she _thought about_ following. She shakes her head and sets to work on her inbox. She puts him out of her mind so thoroughly that she jumps again when he drops into the chair beside her desk.

She slams the side of her fist down on her stapler and gives him a side-long glare. It’s lost on him. He’s staring at the phone in his hand.

“What’s the matter?” she says, pretty sure she’s about to regret saying anything. “Worried there’s gonna be a run on knock-off Writer vests?”

He doesn’t laugh. He doesn’t really seem to have heard her. 

“Alexis.” He says quickly, then looks embarrassed. He tries to cover. “Not sure why your dad being in a shootout isn’t, like, the coolest thing ever. But, she worries.”

“Yeah?” She’s stalling for time. She doesn’t quite know how to respond to what seems to be sincerity from him. It’s not like she has a lot of experience. “Well, she should worry. You do stupid things.”

He looks aggrieved. “I saved your life yesterday!”

“By doing something very stupid,” she cuts him off. She pins him in place with a glare. The feeling that she’s going to regret this is still strong, but she goes on. “The vest isn’t a stupid thing.”

She mumbles the last bit into her paperwork and braces for impact. She braces for what will no doubt be some kind of swaggering, self-satisfied retort.

“No?” He flicks the briefest of uncertain glances her way.

“No.” She makes a production of tapping a bunch of files on the desk to align them. “It just_ looks_ incredibly stupid.”

He doesn’t rise to the bait. He flicks the phone open-and-closed, open-and-closed, then steels himself.

“They work, right?” He looks at her full on. He’s serious, and she pictures his daughter’s mortified face as she lagged behind her mother. “I mean, I did a ton of research before I ordered that one, and I tried to tell her about all the testing they do and the statistics and—”

“They work,” she says, loud enough to drown him out. Loud enough to stop the boys’ fundamentally girlish chatter. “Still better not to get shot.”

“Well.” He buries a relieved smile. He stuffs the phone in his pocket and tries for nonchalant. “Not getting shot is the plan.”

“Is it?” She quirks an eyebrow at him, relieved that the seem to have dropped into their more usual key. “Because I wonder some times.”

“Ooh, you wonder.” He plants an elbow on her desk, and his chin on one fist. “Tell me, Detective. What is it you wonder about?”


	7. Libation—Home Is Where the Heart Stops (1 x07)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This isn’t the drink he’s envisioned buying her. The precinct’s vending machine just might be older than she is. The slot he feeds the coins into is nonspecifically sticky enough that he has to jab at the last quarter with the end of his house key to get it to fall, and even though he manages to ace her out so he can retrieve the can and hand it over with a courtly flourish, this is definitely not the drink he’s envisioned buying her.

This isn’t the drink he’s envisioned buying her. The precinct’s vending machine just might be older than she is. The slot he feeds the coins into is nonspecifically sticky enough that he has to jab at the last quarter with the end of his house key to get it to fall, and even though he manages to ace her out so he can retrieve the can and hand it over with a courtly flourish, this is definitely not the drink he’s envisioned buying her.

He’d thought about using it as a segue into an invitation. He’d thought for a split second about holding the can aloft—out of reach—until she’d agreed to let him buy her a_ real _drink. But a split second was all it took for him to remember that she favors exceptionally wicked heels. He envisions shins maimed, toes stomped, and his slow and violent death written off to a freak accident. And even without the risks that poses to his bodily integrity, he’s begun to suspect that buying her a drink will be complicated.

It shouldn’t be complicated. It wouldn’t have been if she’d just taken him up on his offer at the end of that first case. It wouldn’t have been at all complicated, but then again he wouldn’t be here now, toiling in her wake on a canvas, driving her up the wall by shaking the boys down—and the Captain, too, for bonus points—for a hundred words for criminal. He wouldn’t be fitting in here with them. With her. Kind of fitting in, anyway.

So he supposes it’s worth the trade off, or it would be, if he did trade offs. But he’s Richard Castle, and he doesn’t, so he makes up his mind to buy her a proper drink. He thinks strategy and kicks himself in retrospect for not coming up with some killer line about how grown-ups settle reverse-double-jinx debts. Then he, once again, thinks about her kicking him, this time for such a terrible line, and he’s glad he did no such thing.

He’s trying out better lines when he tracks her down at the shooting range, but … shooting range. And even without that even more direct threat to his person, “complicated” rears its head again. She’s upset, and while there’s a certain ruthless practically to the way his bid for the stolen property photos plays out—while he’s certainly more than a little bit of an ass—he doesn’t seriously entertain the idea of asking once he sees how badly the case is hitting her.

He has absolutely grand plans for the fundraising gala. He has it on good authority that he’s absolutely irresistible in a tux, and he’s counting on the open bar giving him an assist in the “inhibition lowering” department.

He’s counting on a lot of things when she lands the one-two punch of merely existing in that dress and greeting him with a quiet, sincere _Thank you, Castle _where he’d penciled in an ear-twisting at the very least as punishment for sending it. And just like that, there goes the gala for the perfect opportunity, because it’s nice. It’s just … really nice the way she accepts the dress as easily as she accepts his mother’s over-the-top gesture with the borrowed jewelry, and he finds himself scowling down at open bar martinis wondering why inviting her out for a damned drink isn’t the easiest thing in the world.

But it’s not. It’s really not until she shows up on his doorstep on a Saturday when the sun’s barely up. There’s no question they’ll let her leave, and that is the easiest thing the world—the way he insists and his mother seconds the motion. Alexis has already filled a mug for her, and it’s a fait accompli.

He’s studiously busy as she tells her version of the story, taking liberties to make him look as ridiculous as possible. He offers the occasional mock protest, but the three of them have ganged up on him. They wave him off and _Then What Happened? _the thing along. He catches her eye and holds up the pitcher of orange juice in offering. She nods and mouths a quiet Yes, please as his mother captivates them all with her absolutely outrageous take on the auction.   
While they’re engrossed, he slips away to the stemware rack and snags a flute. He sets it in front of her, empty, and spins away again. He can feel her eyes following him, wary, but curious. He tugs open the wine fridge and makes a determined grab for a bottle that’s remarkable but not heart stopping. He’s just about to attack the foil surrounding the wire cage when she holds up an apologetic hand.

“Pardon me, Martha,” she says, her eyes on him. “Castle, what are—”

“I never did get to deliver you that vodka last night.” The foil is off. He’s in it now. “I hope a mimosa will do?”

Alexis and his mother exchange a look that most definitely does not escape Beckett.

“It’s 7:15 AM.” Her lips twitch. Little white lines appear at the corners of her mouth.

“Which is why I was thinking mimosa, not screwdriver.“ He gestures with the bottle, its cork now bare.

“I have to go to work,” she says, her voice tight. 

“So you’d like a raincheck?” His elbows hit the counter. He leans in close. “We’d certainly be happy to honor that at your earliest convenience.”

“Someone’s living dangerously,” his mother crows with a delighted little clap. 

“Not that dangerously.” He flicks a conspiratorial look at her and Alexis. ”I know she won’t kill me in front of you.”

“And you’re sure about that, Dad?”

Alexis’s laugh is on the nervous side. She looks from him to Beckett. Beckett looks pointedly at him.

“No, he’s right.” She slowly lifts one eyebrow, daring him to say anything. “I’ll wait until he thinks I’ve forgotten before I kill him.

“Very wise, darling.” His mother nods. “Best served cold and all that.”

“Oooh,” Alexis brightens. “How will you get rid of the body?

“Friends,” she says with an acid-laced, devastating smile. “I’ve got very good, very useful friends.”

The conversation rolls on with him out the outskirts again. His heart pounds pleasantly as he listens in, as he waits on the three of them, as he contemplates the fact that she’s sipping orange juice from one of his champagne flutes and shooting him deadly looks.

It’s not the drink he envisioned buying her, but it’ll do for now. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Drinks. Hmmm.


	8. Tilt—Ghosts (1 x 08)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It’s a whole different game, there at her desk. She’s not sure why.

It’s a whole different game, there at her desk. She’s not sure why.

There are the obvious reasons, of course. There’s the scratched, ink-stained corner of her desk, instead of the leather-topped table with sunk-in chip racks and beverage holders. There’s vending machine soda instead of ten different kinds of beer or filthy-expensive scotch for the asking. And, of course there’s no Martha trying to scandalize everyone every thirty seconds, or Ryan telegraphing every hand he’s ever had since the beginning of time, but they have their share of onlookers as hand follows hand, and really, it should be the same game.

It’s Texas Hold‘Em, same as before. It’s still pocket cards, flop, turn, river. It’s still blind, raise, call, and it’s even the same deck of cards, as she’s deduced from the faint scar her fingernail managed to leave just at the tip of the Ace of Spades. And there’s certainly the same trash-talking energy between them.

“I see your weird, pee-colored bear—”

“Would _you_ stop saying pee colored?” She fakes a toss toward him, then bails at the last second to pop the little bear into her mouth.

“Would you stop eating the currency? I’m not fronting you any more.” He tosses two “ice cube” bears into the saucer they’re using to hold the pot, because Mr. Whipped Cream Out of the Can is suddenly oh-so-fastidious. “I raise.”

Okay, so the trash-talking isn’t_ exactly _the same, and as she sneaks a peek at the corner of her cards, then one at him as he hides behind his own, it occurs to her that might be the difference. It hasn’t been all trash talk tonight. It hasn’t even _mostly_ been trash talk.

They bicker their way through any number of hands to the soundtrack of him taking absurd issue with her clearly correct bear color–chip denomination scheme.

_Flavor preference is not an objective ranking, Castle.  
_

_How is green not objectively the best flavor? _

_Are you nuts? Red is obviously the best. _

_Red, Detective? Paging Dr. Freud … _

They trade titles of Lee Wax’s forthcoming books back and forth. She hates to admit it, but he’s better at it. 

_Banjos and Bullet Holes …_

_Corsages and Carnage … _

_Oven Mitts and Evisceration …_

She laughs hard enough to inhale a Gummi Bear. He pounds her on the back, wondering aloud what the title will be if he goes down for murder by confection.

They get shushed pretty hard, then, by a couple of night-shifters who are trying to get actual work done, but things turn quiet on their own after that anyway. They have played who knows how many hands in somber silence after doing the math on what Susan Mailer’s impending jail time will mean for the Pikes and their finances.

He deals and she deals, and it’s been who knows how many hands now. It’s a question neither one of them asks as the Gummi Bears dwindle. They’re both slower about their bets, slower to shuffle, slower to actually dole out the cards.

They trade stories about how they each learned to play. His are raunchy and funny and sad. They feature Martha and a cast of a thousand outrageous friends and would-be business associates.

Hers have her first and last cigars in them.

_Gross, Castle. They’re just gross. _

They have skeevy boyfriends—college, high school—but they work their way backward until she’s five and standing on the stretcher bar of her mother’s chair at the dining room table, working out the values of all the different hands on her own, as her parents play for pocket change with friends.

A yawn takes her by surprise—an absolutely gargantuan yawn that startles them both. His chin slips off his fist and they’re both a little embarrassed fo find that the deck’s been sitting, neglected, underneath his elbow for who knows how long.

“Late,” he says, blinking and suddenly self-conscious. “Or early? Wow.”

She finds the window over his shoulder. “Early. Well, I … ”

“Yeah, I …” he agrees, trailing off into gathering up the cards. “Quite the showdown, huh?”

“Quite.” She dumps the saucer into the trash can under her desk, shaking it hard to dislodge the last few reluctant pieces. “You put up a good fight, Castle.” She gives him a sly glance. “For a loser.”

“Loser.” He taps the edge of the deck hard on the desk blotter, then winds the rubber band theatrically around it. “It’s good you’ve kept your sense of humor, even as I_ crushed_ you.”

_“You_ crushed _me?”_ She laughs as she spins the saucer in her hands. “How long have you been having these hallucinations?” 

“So you don’t concede?” They stare each other down for a hard second. “Well, then.” He holds the deck out to her. “Guess you’d better hold on to these, then.”

She hesitates, just long enough for him to notice. Just long enough for something a little uneasy to ripple in the air between them. They both know it’s a whole different game—it’s _been _a whole different game all night. The question is what they do about that now. What _she _does about it, really.

She sets the saucer down. She plucks the deck from his hand and shuts it away in the back of her side drawer. “Guess you’d better pony up with fresh Gummi Bears.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Sometimes the object is obvious. Hmmm.


	9. Backstory—Little Girl Lost (1 x 09)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Nikki Heat is going on a date, and it’s not with Jameson Rook. It’s not a new development.

Nikki Heat is going on a date, and it’s not with Jameson Rook.It’s not a new development.

It is, in fact, a positively ancient non-development. It dates all the way back to Nanny Number Two in the Laundry Room with the Butcher Knife, and it keeps on refusing to develop. It exists as a placeholder on his smart board, as one hundred and one hard returns smack in the middle of an otherwise perfectly functional chapter. It exists as a cursor. Blinking. 

He’s had an excuse up till now. He’s had the fact that she is five feet nine inches of minute-to-minute contradiction. She blushes easily, then turns around and makes _him _blush with something witty and positively shocking. She is unblinking in the face of the foulest of the foul, then blazes with fury so bright it trails silver sparks.

She’s all paradoxes, and he hasn’t been able to picture it. Him. Them. He absolutely hasn’t been able to picture the man who can genuinely command her attention, let alone get close enough to break her heart. 

And he needs her heart to be a little broken. He needs there to be some pre-existing romantic condition that Rook is the answer to. He needs some relationship tension other than Nikki and Rook so this thing doesn’t just turn into a bodice ripper or a Hallmark movie. Or the bodice-ripping Hallmark movie it’s well on its way to being. 

It should be easier now. He has a placeholder to work from, at least: Square-shouldered, square-jawed. Square. But that’s the thing. Will Sorenson is the wrong size and shape. 

On the job, he’s competent in a direct-from factory way that he seems to mistake for something special, if the shoulders-first way he sidles up to every interaction is anything to go by. It’s the same with his approach to her. He’s got nostalgia and the element of surprise going for him. A kiss in a crime scene kitchen when of course her emotions are running high because of the case, but he thinks he’s got her seeing fireworks. He thinks he can have her at will. It’s a wonder this unimpressive clown lasted six months. 

It’s even more of a wonder that six months carries that kind of weight for her. He thinks back to Nanny Number Two and the unanswered question that’s been hanging in the air for him ever since. 

_Any serious candidates? _

It was a total rookie move, in retrospect—a strategy that had backfired the second the question crossed his lips. She never even answered, and he’s the one who hasn’t stopped thinking about what the answer might have been since then.   
  
_No._

That’s what she would have said, given the chance. She’d have played him like that, because _No_ could have meant there were not-so-serious candidates. That there were dozens of them in winding lines that would put his signings to shame. 

But she never answered and now there’s Sorenson and, apparently an out-of-the-blue date and here he is, still stuck. 

It’s got to be nothing, though. The date. He’s not even sure he believes it exists, and even if it does, it absolutely has to be nothing. Doesn’t it?

He puts Sorenson aside. He closes the chapter in progress with its one hundred and one hard returns. Sorenson is the past that will have to be dealt with, but not today. Not when nothing might be just the thing to unstick him. 

He opens something new. He types quickly at the top. A blank document is the kiss of death, so he types the first thing that comes to his fingertips: _A Little More Nikki Heat In Me_.

He laughs to himself, a little bitterly. A little too loudly and keeps going.

How does Nikki Heat end up on nothing date just when the Serious Candidate blows into town?

He scowls, frustrated with his own fast-moving fingers for half a second before the the answer comes to him.

_Lanie,_ he types quickly, then swipes over the name to highlight and make it strikethrough text. _Lauren,_ his brain supplies, and all of a sudden the character has not just a name, but substance. She has a voice. He makes a note to beef up the relationship between Nikki and the friendly neighborhood ME. 

He hears the faint echoes of their conversation. The characters, but Lanie and Beckett, too.The tips of his ears burn. His heart pounds a little faster and he smiles to himself, thinking—knowing—that the two of them talk about him. 

“Okay,” he mumbles aloud. He needs to get back on task. “The Nothing Date—if there is one—is definitely something Lanie might have a hand in. What does that tell us?”

> Inspiration strikes, then. It hits him almost literally in the back of the eyeballs. He types with his right hand, fumbling with his left in the desk drawer for the digital recorder. He can feel the images coming fast and furious, and if he can hit his stride, he can dictate faster than he can type so he doesn’t lose anything.   
_  
Nikki’s heart sank as the man stood, smoothing one hand down a tie so truly awful it had to be seen to be believed. She was seeing and it and still not quite sure she believed that someone—anyone—had crowded lilac, powder blue, and pea green polka dots on to the same scrap of fabric in such numbers._
> 
> _With difficulty, she tore her gaze from the atrocity. Things only got worse as she lifted her chin to offer a smile firmly parked at the polite end of the spectrum. His smile was nowhere in that neighborhood. It was the desperate rictus grin of a man who definitely celebrated two-week anniversaries. _  
  
“You must be Nikki.” He scurried around to pull the chair out for her, almost taking them both down in the process. “Lauren told me—wow—she didn’t talk you up enough. I mean … of course she talked you up. Gosh. She’s gonna kill me. I just mean—wow—you’re gorgeous.”   

> 
> _Nikki murmured a polite thank you and looked around, desperate in her own right, for a server with good line-of-sight to the bar. _  
  
“I hope. Gosh. This seems really silly now … ” The man blushed and stammered. “I hope you don’t mind—”  

> 
> _“Mind?” Nikki prompted, stalling for time as she realized, in sudden terror of her own, that she couldn’t remember his name. William, but not William. Willy? He couldn’t really go by Willy, could he? He was—chronologically, at least, an adult. “Mind what?   
_
> 
> _“I brought you something. An, an, an, an … an ice breaker!”   
_
> 
> _His hands appeared in a sudden, clumsy motion that came a hair’s breadth from sending the bud vase and tea light in the center of the table flying. He plumped down a stuffed panda considerably bigger than the bread basket the confused server had just arrived to deliver. Around the bear’s neck was a comically oversized gift tag that read:_ To Nikky, Love, Willy._  
_
> 
> _“His name,” Willy said proudly, “is Ying-Ying.” _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Recalcitrant objects, given that I already wrote pink bunny. Also Hmmm. 


	10. Safe. Keeping.—A Death in the Family (1 x 10)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The phone calls that she doesn’t answer start later then she would have thought. Not immediately. Not the very second that she walks away from him in the hospital. And they stop sooner. The voicemails she doesn’t listen to—hasn’t listened to, won’t listen to—stop piling up on her phone. Even the hang-ups fall by the wayside, as though in this day and age there’s any mystery to who it is. All of that—the start and stop—isn’t what she would have thought. 

The phone calls that she doesn’t answer start later then she would have thought. Not immediately. Not the very second that she walks away from him in the hospital. And they stop sooner. The voicemails she doesn’t listen to—hasn’t listened to, _won’t _listen to—stop piling up on her phone. Even the hang-ups fall by the wayside, as though in this day and age there’s any mystery to who it is. All of that—the start and stop—isn’t what she would have thought. 

She, as far as she can tell, is the only one he calls. That’s a surprise, too. That he’s not coming at her from all angles. From any angle other than her phone. 

But it must be the case. There are no questions from anyone who really matters after the first day or two. 

_Castle sleeping in?_ Ryan asks, utterly innocent. 

_Sleeping with the fishes? Your boy’s connected, you know._ Esposito adds, his bid for a secret handshake with his partner, dying in mid-air. 

There’s a puzzled look from the Captain, followed by a somber one—a disappointed one—but he makes no comment. None of them gives any indication that their phones are ringing, before, during, or after what can hardly be considered a barrage on her end. 

_Where’s your shadow? _

_Heard we scored a floater overnight. Anything you want to share, Beckett? _

Those linger a while. Knowing grins from people who don’t know a fucking thing. They linger, but not too long. Word gets around and then there’s silence, minute to minute, hour to hour, day to day. 

Lanie doesn’t say a thing. She has to wonder. She does wonder. Kate sees the way her friend watches the swinging doors, waiting for them to smack him practically in the nose because he’s paying more attention to his damned phone than where he’s going. But she doesn’t say a word until a week out or so. 

The phone is still ringing, then. At longer and longer intervals, but it’s still ringing. The vic on the table has nothing to do with anything. A woman who’d been too well-dressed to be in the derelict building where her body was found and that’s it. The only thing resembling a lead she has, after the canvas, after the interviews, after turning the woman’s life inside out. 

Lanie has nothing for her. Blunt force trauma to the head, a few injuries consistent with a tumble down the stairs, after not before, and that’s where the story ends. Kate knows, suddenly, absolutely, that this woman’s story ends there, and she can’t bear the weight. She just can’t bear it. 

She plants a palm on the counter that runs along the wall. She heaves in a breath, and when the room snaps back into its usual geometry, Lanie is studying her with all the empathy in the world. 

_Honey … _

_Fine. Lanie, it’s fine. _

It’s the only thing the two of them say on the subject. 

There’s silence, then. The phone stops ringing, even intermittently. The last question dies away, _Hey, Beckett, Where’s … _ and there’s nothing of him left beyond the occasional hissing of the espresso machine. 

She works. She goes home. She meets Will for coffee, for a dinner. They both try too hard, and that’s the end of that. She doesn’t go for drinks with the boys when they ask. She begs off the every-other-week Sunday breakfast she’s supposed to have with her dad, once, twice. 

It’s the third Sunday when there’s a knock on her door. There’s a bike messenger with a crinkled Manila envelope in his hand. His legs are bare all the way down to the tops of the bright blue bike shoes. There’s sweat slipping into the neck of his sleeveless jersey and she realizes with a blink that it’s summer. It’s gotten to be summer while she wasn’t looking. 

She signs her name without seeing. She scoops some amount of cash out of her wallet and shoves it into his hands. It could be too little or too much. The astonished look on his face tells her nothing, and She doesn’t stop to check before she practically closes the door on his bright blue toes. 

She makes her way to the couch somehow. With uncertain steps and the envelope held at arm’s length from her body like something noxious, she makes her way there and drops it to the cushions as she sinks down. 

Her phone rings. Rage sizzles through her, but a glance reveals it’s her dad. It’s the _try again _week she’d suggested and he deserves better. The people in the life she’s clawed out of the wreckage of her mother’s death deserve better, so she answers. 

_Yeah, Dad. Today is still good as long as you don’t mind making it lunch … _

_No, nothing. Just something landed on my doorstep just now. _

_A laugh that sounds almost normal. _

_Yeah, Sunday morning and still … I just need to take care of it. Won’t take long. _

A laugh from him. Warm words tinged with concern. 

_Yeah, Dad. Me, too. See you soon. _

She sets the phone aside. She folds her hands in her lap and pulls air into her lungs methodically through her nose. Too rapidly, too rapidly at first, but the technique does its work, out of practice as she is. 

When her pulse has slowed, when her breath levels out on its own, she reaches for the envelope. She feels the weight of it across her knees. She turns it over. It’s sealed tight. The gummed flap is smooth and secure, the brass wings are folded flat. The crackled yellow expanse is uninterrupted on this side. There’s no message scrawled, no plea or admonition. She turns it over again and studies the simplicity of it. Her name and address, _Kate Beckett, _ no title. In the left-hand corner_, RC _and his address, nothing more. 

_I just need to take care of it. _

She hears her own voice, strange and far off sounding. She looks through the kitchen to the arch of glass and beyond to the outside world, where it’s summer. It’s practically summer, and that puts paid to whatever melodramatic fantasies she might have been entertaining about oil drum fires, flames licking at the careful slant of his small caps. _Kate Becket, Kate Bec, Kate … _

_I just need to take care of it._

She tosses the thing away from her. She showers. She dresses carefully. Not too carefully. She hears her voice, strange and far off and tells herself she won’t cause her dad another minute’s worry. Not another second. She takes up her keys and her wallet. Her phone. She checks the screen out of habit. She checks it again out of stupid expectation, but there’s nothing. No missed calls. None. 

She heads for the door. She’s on the far side of it, her key in the lock, when she retreats. She retraces her steps and takes up the envelope where it’s slid to lean against the big ottoman she uses as a coffee table. She shoves it under her arm, unthinking. 

She goes on like that—unthinking—until Lanie opens the door to her own apartment. 

“Kate.” 

She opens her arms as though she’s been waiting for this moment for days, for weeks, for a long, long time. The envelope crackles between their bodies. Something like a sob undulates through Kate for the first time. The very first time since she walked away down that hospital corridor. 

“What do you need me to do?” 

It’s the only question Lanie asks. The only one. 

They’re facing one another on her couch, knees practically touching. The envelope is … somewhere. It’s out of Kate’s hands, out of sight, and that’s a mercy. That’s where it needs to be. It’s why she came here. 

“Just keep it?” She wishes that she sounded more certain of herself. More certain of anything, but Lanie takes up that burden for her. “I think …” 

“I can keep it, I can burn it, I can cut him with it so he bleeds out—”

Kate snorts. She laughs and as the sound makes its jagged way into the world, she realizes how out of practice she’s gotten. “With a Manila envelope?” 

“You doubt me?” Lanie arches one brow. 

“I don’t.” Her voice is low. Her chin burrows between her collar bones. “I might ask for it. I don’t know, Lain. Maybe …” 

“You might ask for it,” she says quietly. “I might say no. I might not. I know you, girl.”

“Glad someone does.” 

She laughs again. She means to, but what happens instead is painful. It’s shockingly painful, even though she’s relieved. She’s relieved that it’s out of sight, out of her hands, but that crackled, uninterrupted expanse of yellow is painful, wherever it is. The silence of the phone in her pocket is painful.

She walks out the door and into the world, where it’s summer. She walks out, wholly alone. 

It’s painful. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: And that’s that. Thanks for reading. Hmmm. 


End file.
